


Fire In Her Heart

by dearlydraupadi



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Backstory, Body Modification, Canon Character of Color, Female Character of Color, Gen, Mako Saves Everyone, Medical Experimentation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-19
Updated: 2014-08-19
Packaged: 2018-02-13 19:55:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,127
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2163210
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dearlydraupadi/pseuds/dearlydraupadi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mako Mori has always had a fire in her heart. It is only recently that the fire became literal.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fire In Her Heart

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is inspired almost entirely by this lovely piece of art and commentary: http://greyneurosis.tumblr.com/post/84089936300/salamispots-breathe-what-if-mako-was-iron
> 
> I wish I could take more credit for it, but it kind of just busted out after that, whether I wanted it to or not. Anyway, all credit for the idea goes to those two lovely people, and all credit for Pacific Rim goes to the usuals. I just loved this idea, and couldn't let it go without comment.

She has always had a fire in her heart, but it is still new to her that the fire is literal. It warms her face with an orange glow - she is startled to realize that the glow makes her seem more approachable, softer, more human. The heat is not enough to burn through her shirts, and she finds that with a thick enough sweater it is hard to even detect the light that comes from her inner fire. But she has little reason to hide. Her heart has given her new life, and she refuses to be ashamed. 

When she was first taken - taken by gangsters sick of the Pan-Pacific Defense Corps telling them where they may and may not scavenge for kaiju remains - she was terrified. Years of living under constant threat were nothing to staring that threat down in its fancy golden shoes, and cowering as evil flicked a switchblade at her face and said it was going to make her daddy a new necklace. Mako did not cry, but only because she had forgotten how. Her eyes were dry not because she was not afraid, but because her tears were too frightened to appear. She swallowed back bile instead and calmly asked what evil wanted.

“What do I want?” it mused. “What do I goddamned want? I want your daddy to get off his high horse and come deal with me like a fucking man. I want a luxury condo on Venice Beach and I want the world not to be covered in blue kaiju shit. I want recognition as the legitimate businessman that I am. But most of all?”

He leaned in close, and she could smell his breath, look at the webbing of the scar on his eye as it spun out from behind his sunglasses. She could not think of words to say, and up close, from this distance, evil’s scar was beautiful. It had channels and valleys and tributaries and streams and all she could think of in that moment was her father - her birth father, the man who gave her life and a name, but not the man who would later give her a cause - opening a book of photographs.

The photographs were ones he himself had taken of the Yangtze River, taken from a helicopter flying high above. It was a contract from a tour company looking to expand their business to include the Chinese mainland, and her father had crowed for days about the contract. When the pictures came back, though, the tour company thought they were too artistic, not exciting enough. They did not pay him, and released him from his contract.

He’d sighed then when he told her this, then held up the book of photographs. “The key,” he told her, “is to never forget that your flaws are really your strengths. They say my pictures are too beautiful.”

He’d opened the book and drawn his hand across the page. “They are right. My photographs have grasped the beauty of this world. That is not something to be ashamed of. Perhaps for a time we will eat inferior noodles and your mother will worry…” She’d laughed at that, as her mother had a habit of worrying whenever her father lost a job, terrified that this would be the moment that reduced their family to indigence. It never did. Poverty was not the culminating tragedy for her family. 

“But we will know that we have added to the beauty in this world, flaws or no.” 

She’d smiled and taken his hand, and that had been all. But now, it was not all. The tributaries in evil’s face reminded her of her father, and her father reminded her of her other father, and it was with full awareness of her heritage that she stood tall, looked in his face, and said simply, “I do not wish to know what you want.”

And evil had glowered at that, lines darkening on his face and his hand clenching around the knife. He cut a red line down her cheek, and then one across her chest. Then she remembered nothing but his voice, promising, “You got spirit, kid. Heart. Let’s see how you do with it outside your chest.”

She sometimes wished that evil was still around somewhere, instead of buried deep in an unmarked grave where her father had placed him, surrounded by friends and sworn to secrecy. She wished he were alive so that she could show him her new heart. He had cut out her old one, hoping to cut out her fire. He had only made it possible for them to give her more.

It was strange to think of herself dead, but she knew later from Tendo, as he relayed his joy at her revival through streams of tears, that her body had been sent back to the Shatterdome in pieces. Her heart strung through with a chain and worn around her neck as her chest gaped open. A message. Tendo told her how her father had wept openly, for all the techs to see, then slowly calmed and cooled and turned to rage. How he’d brought in the best of the best, refused to listen to reason, and saved her. Her old heart was still kept, Chuck had told her, quiet and sad as he scratched his dog’s ears, in a jar in the surgery. A reminder.

The underworld never bothered them anymore, and the kaiju were even less of a problem. Mako was faster and stronger and better than she had ever been. She had the heart of a jet engine inside her chest, and it whirred constantly with joy and rage and sorrow and anticipation. Her father touched her cheek sometimes, his hand tracing the scar, but she always reminded him that it was a gift. Her flaws had made her stronger, and she would not be afraid.

The operation was still a mystery to her, but she realized quickly that she did not mind. The technology was there, of course, from the beginning. The Jaeger tech that they used to make bombs and create planes that needed no fuel and could run for days. The tech that allowed the world to fight back against the kaiju, to win. It slotted into her chest where her heart had been and it made her strong. She would not be ashamed of her fire, because it was the fire she’d been given to overcome death, to survive evil.

Mako Mori was given two fathers, and she honored them both. She still loved and saw the beauty in the world, spirals and flowers and stones and the relentless water, and she also knew she had the responsibility to protect it. Better, she had the ability. 


End file.
